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technology

Machine Intelligence as Criminal Mastermind?

Context: The Criminal Potential of Artificial Intelligence Beyond autonomous cybernetic system as tool or aperture of adversarial vulnerability lies the distinct possibility of AI as malevolent criminal mastermind. Notwithstanding the current paucity of anything even vaguely resembling Artificial General Intelligence, and regardless of our best (and worst) aspirations to benchmark and bootstrap this technology into […]

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technology

The Great American Novel will not be Automated

Context: The Great American Novel will not be written by a Computer It’s a great point and notwithstanding that hard-core reductionist types often enough give the piñata of John Searle’s Chinese Room a comprehensively passive aggressive thrashing with pitchforks and torches, it is an irreducible fact under the current ascendant paradigm. Semantic complexity in either […]

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Philosophy

Ethical Principles in AI: The Diversity of Approaches Masks a Unifying Truth

From the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University: “(…) this white paper and its associated data visualization compare the contents of thirty-six prominent AI principles documents side-by-side.” It is clearly an admirable endeavour. Note that: a simultaneously proliferating diversity of (re)sources and aggregation around key points reflects and illustrates more than […]

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Philosophy

Synthetic Biases

Context: What Is Synthetic Data? …and yet, with this – the bootstrap into virtualised abstraction becomes all but complete. Fascinating and clearly intersects with some of Jean Baudrillard’s observations on simulation, semiotics and reality. Training machine intelligence on data generated in virtual worlds solves some tricky problems but at what cost; where does the “real-world” […]

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Philosophy

AI: Big Data, Narrow Intelligence

Context: The False Philosophy Plaguing AI The (or at least a) problem here is that the ascendant technologies, frameworks, cultures and commercial incentives have inadvertently stumbled upon the constructive and recursively self-inflected sweet-spot through which those core assumptions themselves optimally self-propagate. If the incentives and rewards for developers, researchers and corporate or institutional entities find […]

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technology

Cybersecurity’s Endless Spinning Wheel

Context: Utah cyberattacks on the rise as millions paid out in new ‘double-extortion’ ransomware schemes Does there ever come a point at which the accelerating combinatorial complexity of this context transcends human aptitude to comprehend and mitigate the hyper-inflating entropy of the problem-space? I imagine that as long as human brains, incentives and motivations are […]

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Philosophy

Personal Data, Privacy and the Normative Ubiquity of Technological Self-Surveillance

An introspective taxonomy of labels and the grammatical order of participatory technology in – and as – systems of knowledge and control has always been the nature, kernel and subjective essence of personal identity. It is difficult to identify a particular inflection point at which this Linnean, categorical game evolved from constructive personal boundary and […]

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Philosophy

War

Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]

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Philosophy

Artificial General Intelligence

Context: Artificial general intelligence: Are we close, and does it even make sense to try? It seems to me that there is an unbridgeable discontinuity here between a belief in the ascendant utility of more data processed faster and the (at least superficially) antithetical systemic self-containment and enigmatic ontological bootstrap of a sentience that I […]

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Philosophy

AI: The Bias Inside

The bias in machine learning (and AI more generally) is the bias in data. The bias in data replicates the bias in ourselves, our distributed social and cultural information-processing systems, and in the natural orientation of complex information and energy-processing systems towards autonomous self-propagation through optimally-concise self-representational abstraction(s). Machine Learning applies mathematical heuristics to extract […]

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technology

Regulating Artificial Intelligence

Context: Annual index finds AI is ‘industrializing’ but needs better metrics and testing If an intractable problem in any such rapidly-evolving technological or regulatory frame of reference is that an accelerating pace of change at least partially invalidates models, axioms and assumptions before they have ever even been operationalised, then we find ourselves (yet again) staring […]

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technology

Self-driving cars with one eye closed?

Context: Elon Musk Says Tesla’s Full-Self Driving Beta V9.0 Is Almost Ready (They are dropping the radar.) A thought that comes to mind is that of an ML system that having been trained with some static n number of streaming (sensory) data points/observations, having had the system narrow focus on less data might brute-force an […]